Scrap Tire Recycling Technology
As we try to reduce the amount of waste we produce, one of the most problematic items we must deal with are scrap tires. Constructed to be extremely durable, and made from materials that take considerable time to degrade into the environment, the sheer volume of tires our automobile-centric society goes through leaves us with a waste management problem of epic proportions. Luckily, a number of ways to reuse these tires have been developed, offering us more options than packing them away into landfills.
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Retreading
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One of the simplest methods of recycling a tire is to use it in its original, whole form. Many tires are replaced while their structure is still sound, and their worn treads can often be replaced. You can use retreads for some time before they become too damaged to be remounted safely. The over-the-road trucking industry in particular makes considerable use of retreaded tires, due to the considerable number of tires needed to keep trucks rolling.
Whole Tires
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Whole tires may be used for a variety of applications, most often in construction situations where strength and bulk are required cheaply. Scrap tires are often used in landscaping, to help control erosion and to reinforce earthen walls. In some cases, tires have even been used to construct dams and other civil engineering projects, providing a low-cost building material with considerable resilience.
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Shredding
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Another method of recycling tires is to shred those that are too worn for retreading, allowing the use of the scrap rubber in other applications. For instance, shredded tires can strengthen asphalt or other building materials, providing extra structure and strength to the material at a considerably reduced cost. Shredded tire rubber can also be recycled into other items where fresh rubber might otherwise be used, such as brake pads, floormats and other similar items.
Component Elements
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The most advanced method of recycling tires is to reduce them to their component elements, to recover the steel, rubber and carbon used to create them in the first place. The interwoven nature of tire construction makes this reclamation difficult, and tires must often be subjected to high heat or extreme chemical processes to separate the various materials and allow for their recapture and reuse. Unfortunately, many of these methods considerably reduce the quality of the reclaimed materials, limiting the applications for which they can be used.
Advancements
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There are many different ways to reuse scrap tires, depending on the quality of the construction and the tire's lifetime wear. As the demand for new tires is unlikely to diminish anytime soon, the quest for more advanced and more creative methods of reusing the considerable waste generated by tire replacement will be ongoing.
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References
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of netwalkerz_net
